Born in New York, poet Carmen Giménez Smith earned a BA in English from San Jose State University and an MFA in creative writing from the University of Iowa. She writes lyric essays as well as poetry, and is the author of the poetry chapbook Casanova Variations (2009), the full-length collection Odalisque in Pieces (2009), and the memoir Bring Down the Little Birds: On Mothering, Art, Work, and Everything Else (2010). Her most recent book, Milk and Filth (2013), was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. Her poems have been included in the anthologies Floricanto Si! U.S. Latina Poets (1998) and Contextos: Poemas (1994). Giménez Smith is the editor-in-chief of Puerto del Sol and publisher of Noemi Press. She teaches at New Mexico State University in Las Cruces, New Mexico.

giovanni singleton is a native of Richmond, Virginia, a former debutant, and founding editor of nocturnes (re)view of the literary arts, a journal dedicated to experimental work of the African Diaspora and other contested spaces. Her debut poetry collection, Ascension (Counterpath Press), informed by the music and life of Alice Coltrane, received the 81st California Book Award Gold Medal. She has received fellowships from the Squaw Valley Community of Writers Workshop, Napa Valley Writers Conference, and Cave Canem. singleton regularly consults and gives presentations on writing, editing, graphic design, and publishing at high schools, colleges, and conferences. Her work has appeared in What I Say: Innovative Poetry by Black Writers in America, Best American Experimental Writing, Inquiring Mind, Angles of Ascent: A Norton Anthology, and elsewhere, and has also been exhibited in the Smithsonian Institute’s American Jazz Museum, San Francisco’s first Visual Poetry and Performance Festival, and on the building of Yerba Buena Center for the Arts. She has taught poetry at the de Young Museum, CalArts, Naropa University, and Sonoma State University. She was the 2015-16 Visiting Assistant Professor in the creative writing programs at New Mexico State University and currently coordinates the Lunch Poems reading series at UC Berkeley. A new book, American Letters: works on paper, was published by Canarium Books in 2018.

Spring 2018 Living Writers:
A Knotted Atlas: Writers on Entanglement

This spring quarter will feature eight contemporary writers who explore the knotted spaces and generative possibilities of entangled lives. Their works illuminate the historical enmeshment of cruel futures and hidden histories, persons and things, race and freedom, kinship and loss, and the human and non-human natural world.

April 12: Sherwin Bitsui

April 26: Leif Haven, Jared Harvey

May 3: Courtney Kersten

May 17: Carmen Gimenez Smith and giovanni singleton

May 24: Sawako Nakayasu

May 31: Robin Coste Lewis

June 7: UCSC Creative Writing Program, Undergraduate Student Reading

Humanities Lecture Hall, 206

Thursdays, 5:20-6:50 PM

All Readings are Free and Open to the Public

Contact: Chris Chen (cche75@ucsc.edu)

This event is co-sponsored by the Porter College George Hitchcock Poetry Endowment, American Indian Resource Center, El Centro, Asian American/Pacific Islander Resource Center, Laurie Sain Creative Writing Endowment, the Chicano Latino Research Center, Cowell College, Bay Tree Bookstore, the Siegfried B. and Elisabeth M. Puknat Literary Series Endowment, the Literature Department, and the Creative Writing Program.